30 Robert-he was dying-was about work. And how he wanted me to write the text for his photographs of flowers. Which 1 did." Among the projects Smith is now pursuing are "Ain't Nuthin' but a She Thing," a compilation album to bene- fit women's issues (she'll sing the Nina Simone standard "Don't Smoke in Bed"), and a new solo album-her first in seven years-which she will record in New York this summer. 'Working on these projects makes me think of Rob- ert, always," Smith said. "The camera made him take responsibility for his actions It was like what Robert was always saytng-'I'll take responsibility for my actions, but I want the freedom , " to act. URBAN RENEWAL F OURTEEN black and Hispanic students from West Side High School, an alternative public school for kids who are considered to be "at risk," recently gathered in a classroom on the eleventh floor of the garment-district office building that houses the school to tell other students, and teachers, about two and a half months they had Just spent in the Middle East, most of it working on the Kibbutz Lehavot Ha- bashan, in Israel. Several of these kids had never before been on an airplane; a few had never left New York City. Like blind people granted sight, they had been amazed by humble things. Clifford Slaughter, who wore a red cap tilted back at south-southeast, said that on a trip to Eilat he saw "clear water" for the first time in his life. Mirtha Medina, whom everyone calls Milky, said she was feeling sad one morning and went out to the children's little red swing and swung and thought for hours-and nobody hassled her. Mike Nelson said, "I was shocked the first time I was visiting my family, and they just left me in their house alone. I was sitting in their house like, Whoa! They don't do this in New York-you come back and your stuff is missing." The students, who had grown up in ghettos, were the latest beneficiaries of a six-year-old program run by a non- profit group called Y outhworks. On the kibbutz, they lived together, woke up at five-thirty in the morning, and spent the day on such tasks as working in the gar- den or tending a flock of truculent tur- keys. Many of them were used to a life in which virtually nothing was asked of them, or offered to them, and at first they were lonely, homesick, bored. But within weeks they had been overwhelmed by the generosity and the sheer warmth of the kibbutz. Lehavot Habashan is only a few miles from the Lebanese border and the Golan Heights; the kids were amazed to find that a place bristling with weaponry was nonetheless more peaceful and serene than anything they had previously known. T HESE were teen-agers, so they talked less about Israel than about themselves. "The Middle East trip was one of the best things that happened to me personally," said Darian Mobley, who, with a long face beneath a black cap, looked far older than his seventeen years. "I'm the class clown. I never had any kind of goals or pri- orities. Being out there, on your own, washing your own drawers, getting up for work, helps you a lot. I've become a lot more responsible." One of the people who had gathered to hear the students was Chaya Degan, a short middle-aged woman with long, straight dark hair and a perpetual smile. Degan, by coincidence, had come from the kibbutz to see her daughter graduate from Qyeens College. When the program's associate director, Ayala Donchin, introduced her, Mike, who had had to be coaxed into speaking, shouted, "She's my grandmother!" The kids had begun to loosen up, and were laughing and goofing around, but when Degan began to speak, in Hebrew, they fell silent No teacher could even aspire to such reverent attention. All Degan said was that the kibbutzniks had learned as much from the kids as vice versa, but it was as if her smile, and her Hebrew, had taken them for a moment THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 19,1995 to Israel, where they all wanted to be. Mter Degan spoke, the kids talked about the sense of disorientation that had accompanied their return, eleven days earlier. They had been transformed: the world was now divided into the few who understood and the many who didn't, and didn't care. Milky said, "It's like 'How was Israel? All right, I'll see you later.' " And then there would be the usual talk about drug-dealer boyfriends going off to jail. "I don't need to hear it," Milky said. Later, the kids dispersed, and Ayala Donchin sat on a desk and talked about the "youth-services program," a support network for the returnees. It seemed to consist mosdy of a friendly ear. Jonell Qyinones recalled the time that one of the kids hurt his hand playing basket- ball, and Jonell's friend Nir, one of the kibbutzniks, shook off sleep, comman- deered a car, and drove him to a distant hospital. And it wasn't just Nir-others helped, too. "They didn't have to do that," J onell said, with a wondering look. "They wouldn't do it here." COSTA-GAVRAS STRIKES A MATCH ^BOUT seven-eighths of the way .L\. through Costa-Gavras's new film, "A Minor Apocalypse," which will be receiving its New York première this week at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, at Lincoln Center, you may find yourself starting to feel really sorry for the folks on the festival's steering committee, who chose this, of all moments, as the oc- casion on which to bestow their first annual Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award on the Greek- French filmmaker. Not that Costa- Gavras, whose consistently passionate and hard-hitting work includes such engagé classics as "Z," "State of Siege," and "Missing," wouldn't seem a self- evident choice for such an honor. It's just that with this latest film-or, any- way, through well over seven-eighths of it-Costa-Gavras seems to have kIssed off that entire æuvre, along with all the principled commitments that once ap- peared to undergird it. And, further- more, he seems to have had a wIckedly good time doing so. The film IS based on the Polish writer